Did you know

Reporters Without Borders said in it’s 2005 special report titled “Xinhua: the world’s biggest propaganda agency”, that “Xinhua remains the voice of the sole party”, “particularly during the SARS epidemic, Xinhua has for last few months been putting out news reports embarrassing to the government, but they are designed to fool the international community, since they are not published in Chinese.”

China’s Deadly Pollution of Air, Water, Land and Health Status

According to an 18-month study released recently by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and previous exposed World Bank report, here’s some numbers showing the deadly pollution of air, water, land and the health status in China:

(picture: The polluted Songhua river near to the Chinese city of Harbin. Photograph: China Photos/Getty, from The Guardian website)

1. “highly polluted” water, covering:

– 1/3 the length of all China’s rivers
– 75% of its major lakes
– 25% of all its coastal waters

Caused health problem:

– 300 million people are drinking contaminated water on a daily basis
– 190 million are suffering from water related illnesses each year
– Nearly 30,000 children die from diarrhoea due to polluted water each year

2. Air:

– overtake the United States as the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases

Caused health problem:

– 750,000 Chinese die prematurely each year, Beijing forced the World Bank to delete this figures from a similar report.
– Unless pollution is controlled, by 2020 it will cause 600,000 premature deaths in urban areas and 20 million cases of respiratory illness a year

3. waste:

– More than 17,000 towns have no sewage works at all
– human waste from nearly one billion people is barely collected or treated

– Nearly 70% of the rural population has no access to safe sanitation.

4. Land:
– 27% of the landmass of the country is now becoming desertified